Category Archives: Italy

Going Home

July 31, 2012 – 9:12 pm

*This isn’t a funny post, nor is there really a food aspect to it. I know this is a food blog and you expect food, but sometimes it’s okay to break the rules.*

It’s over. I’m in London for the night and head back to the States tomorrow.

At the beginning of this trip I was still overcome with the crippling anxiety and worry that I couldn’t seem to shake. The unease and numbness from being bored, boring, wanting. Of feeling that I was stuck, of needing my comfort zone and relying on it while attempting to thrive in the small box I’d placed myself into.

Whenever someone asks me to try and explain what anxiety is like, I tell them it’s like dealing with a child, someone completely separate from yourself. Like children, anxiety is temperamental and can lash out at any time with seemingly no rhyme or reason. And the more you reason with it and contain its petulant behavior, the more it wants to be heard. There were times when I was so overwhelmed with such heavy anxiety I would be curled on the floor, nauseated to the point of wanting to die. I would speak to my anxiety and bargain with it, pleading for it to work with me. We will get through this together, I’d say, feeling nuttier by the minute. How could I throw caution to the wind and strip away the tethers that comforted me when going to the next town over sent me into a cold and sweaty panic? A person can only handle so much of that before it beats them down, leaving a shadow cast over who they used to be and who they want to be.

Anxiety isn’t as strong as it thinks it is.

In the last 3 months I’ve gone to so many beautiful places, ate many delicious and disgusting things, put myself into situations well outside of my comfort zone and thrived without the burden of anxiety. I quit my JOB, the most stable part of my life! To come to Europe! To cook and eat!

I don’t know what’s going to come of my adventure. Maybe something incredible, maybe nothing but these amazing memories I’ve built. But if nothing else, I pursued something I felt was beyond my grasp and defeated the worst part of my anxiety: the part that was always so convincing when telling me I couldn’t have what I really wanted for myself.

I wouldn’t say I’m lucky, because that discredits the work I put into it. But I feel so lucky.

I wouldn’t say I’m blessed, because that places too much holy into my very secular journey. But I feel so blessed.

Above these, I feel something I forgot I could feel until I got out of my own way and let it peek through layers of senseless worry I’ve accumulated year after year:

So. Fucking. Happy.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Bologna Italy Recipes Sweet Travel

Fig Gelato with Balsamic Drizzle

July 1, 2012 – 11:23 am

My stay in Italy is now officially over. I just arrived in Paris this morning after a fifteen hour overnight bus ride where the huge ape of a man sitting next to me took up half of my seat and the bus driver blared – BLARED – Celine Dion power ballads at 4 in the morning. I sat stewing in my miniature bus seat with no recline feature, back aching, lethargy and rage overcoming me. I’d almost forgotten why I didn’t like Celine, but it’s all coming back to me now. Anyway, this post isn’t about Paris just yet. This is a post I know a few of my friends have been looking forward to for a while and I couldn’t complete a trip to Italy without touching on GELATO.

Italians are fiercely serious about their gelato, and if you ever try to get in the way of an Italian and their gelato they will cut you deep. On any given day at any given hour, you can find the sidewalks bursting with people, most of whom are carrying gelatos in every shade represented on the color wheel.

Permalink | Comment (0)

Italy Modena Travel

A Day in Modena: Parmigiano-Reggiano, Balsamic Vinegar and Procuitto Tours

June 28, 2012 – 12:51 am

Even though I’d prepared myself for the smell, I wasn’t prepared for the smell. Nobody’s ever really prepared for the smell. Our tour group had just arrived to the Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese factory in Modena, Italy, which was the first stop on our three-stop tour. The other two being authentic Italian balsamic and procuitto ham mills. I’d been to milk factories when I was in college, all of which had a distinct smell not unlike the sour breath of a freshly nursed baby mixed with sullied backend of specific milk-producing farm animals.

The Parmigiano-Reggiano factory sits in the countryside of Modena on farmland next to their primary milk sources: brown and black fatties grazing in an adjacent field with utters that bulged like fully distended bagpipes. If bagpipes also produced milk, I might be more inclined to forgive them their existence.

Though I refer to it as a cheese “factory” it really is more an artisanal cheese processing building than any kind of standard factory. There are no industrialized machines producing the cheese, instead it is produced exclusively by the bare hands of burly men who, at 5 AM every morning, start the extremely physical and arduous process. The cheese chef (or the “big cheese”, if you will, which I will because I clearly can’t help myself) works 365 a year with no vacation to ensure the entire process is completed flawlessly 100% of the time. I envy this man’s job as much as I envy the presence of an obtrusive goiter.

Permalink | Comments (10)

Bologna Italy Recipes Salty Travel

Orecchiette with Black Truffle Tapenade – with Video Tutorial

June 24, 2012 – 6:09 pm

Since coming to Europe I’ve tried numerous times to meet up with CouchSurfers, but to no avail. Have you heard of CouchSurfing? Do you surf? Have you been needlessly emotionally tortured by CouchSurfers? I have!

In Madrid I’d made dinner plans with three different people – THREE – all of whom stood me up. Except they didn’t really stand me up, they got to the restaurant forty minutes after the time we’d agreed on, which was long after I’d given up waiting and left. A later attempt at meeting a CouchSurfer at the Prado in Madrid failed because she showed up 45 minutes late. Or so she said, though she could have easily spotted me and ran the opposite direction. After how many times being stood up do you have to take a good look at yourself and ask, how ugly am I?

So when I agreed to a CouchSurfing picnic meet-up here in Bologna, I was skeptical. Ten or so people had agreed to meet at the park behind my apartment, and if I ended up being stood up for an event I didn’t even coordinate then I was going to set myself on fire. Luckily, it ended up being the most successful (read: only) CouchSurfing event I’ve ever been to and we had 8 people show, including myself, which consisted of a few native Italians, a German, an American, a Brit and a Pole.

Among the food items were baguettes, proscuitto and cheese cubes, fresh in-season fruits and the obligatory wine and beer, because it’s not a picnic until livers are put to the test. I’d originally planned on making orecchiette with a black truffle tapenade, but then remembered this was a low-key picnic with strangers and not an outing in the Hamptons with the Real Housewives of New York. Unfortunately.

Permalink | Comments (4)

Italy Paleo Recipes Recipes Rome Salty Salty Travel Venice

Recipe for the Freshest Marinara Sauce & Cooking Classes in Rome, Italy

June 19, 2012 – 10:03 pm

A couple weeks back, Brandon came to join me in Italy for a break from the working American monotony. Between eating and venturing through Bologna, navigating the canal-scored streets of Venice and stumbling through the ruins of Rome, it’s been a busy couple of weeks with little respite. Finding the opportunity to write up a recap has been a challenge, and ignoring a guest who traveled 3000 miles to see me to instead scheme up quips for my blog borders on the side of rude, which may be why I’m now writing one at 2AM.

After we’d zipped through the murky-watered Venice for a day, we then bee-lined our way to The Eternal City for a three day stop. The streets of Rome are thronged with so many English-speaking tourists that I began to wonder if Italians were even actually among us. We spent most of our time lounging and soaking up the Roman architecture, with the exception of our second day when we found ourselves in a cooking class, cooped up in a muggy and crowded kitchen and taking orders from a sardonic Italian chef (e.g. During the demonstration he held an egg up and asked the class if it looked like a freshly-laid egg. One of the girls said yes, to which he zoomed in two inches from her face, pointed to the printed numbers on the egg and said without skipping a beat, “Oh, really? Your bionic chickens have printers in their butts?”).

Brandon had booked us a day with Cooking Classes in Rome, which was his first cooking class ever, and I was nervous. Brandon isn’t the type of guy that likes to cook, so he just doesn’t do it. If left to his own devices, he’ll eat sugary cereal until diabetes claims his right foot, after which he might hobble to the pantry to eat cat food. Or the cats. Or whatever he finds under the refrigerator, I don’t know. Eating for him is a necessity for survival rather than for experience, and I like to think that I was brought into his life to show him a thing or two about what it means to love food and to keep him from getting rickets.

Permalink | Comments (6)